Receiving POP3 mail into a Linux Domino server using getmail and sendmail

I have a need to receive mail from a POP3 account into a domino server running on Centos 5.5 as an appliance.  

Some time ago on windows I used the Chimeras Email Forwarding System which worked very well but this was a Linux server.

The scheme I came up with uses a combination of  Getmail version 4 and Sendmail.

Getmail is a Linux utility which will poll different types of mail accounts and then pass those messages on. It has an option to pipe the messages to an external mail delivery agent such as Sendmail. Sendmail can then send them on to the Domino server as SMTP on the localhost address.

These notes are for a Centos 5.5 installation with the Webmin web based management console

Install and configure Getmail

Create a new user called mailer or similar and a password. This is because Getmail will not call Sendmail if it is run as root.

As Root download Getmail

see http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/documentation.html#installing

$ cd /tmp/
$ wget http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/old-versions/getmail-4.20.0.tar.gz
$ tar xzf getmail-version.tar.gz
$ rpm -ihv getmail-version-release.noarch.rpm
$ cd getmail-version
$ python setup.py build

I then used Winscp to create the configuration file /home/mailer/.getmail/getmailrc

In this case the receiving account on the Domino server will be the Administrator account. Getmail has lots of other options

[retriever]
type = SimplePOP3Retriever
server = acme.com
username = peter pan
password =

[destination]
type = MDA_external
path = /usr/sbin/sendmail
arguments = (“-i”,”-bm”, “administrator@localhost”)

[options]
verbose = 0
read_all = false
delete = false
message_log = ~/.getmail/log

[default]

Sendmail and Domino cannot normally run on the same box because they both need to bind to port 25. In this scenario Sendmail does not need to listen to port 25 so it can be configured to listen on port 26 ( or any other unused port ). I used the Webmin client to make this change under Servers > Sendmail > Network Ports

Log in as mailer
enter getmail -v
The -v gives a verbose output so that you can see what is happening.

I used webmin to set up the cron job running as the mailer user

System > Scheduled Cron Jobs

You may need to set Sendmail up to start on bootup
You may need to allow pop3 mail through your firewall

As usual all feedback on better schemes welcomed !
Sean